Is Google all it's cracked up to be.
 

I'll tell you why, I am struggling like heck to promote my forum through the tried and suggested means.

• Blog comments
• Forum posting
• In niche links
• Article submission

They are all now virtually all no-follow, or any links I leave have been deleted, so I Googled for "promoting a forum for free", ( and variants), and the top of the searches was posts or articles, the most up to date was 2011, so far out of date it wasn't even worth reading.

So if Google isn't updating out of date links like this, how can we rely on it to update the rest of the stuff.

I decided to delve deeper, downloaded a free program, and used it to analyse a competitors backlinks, which according to Google must be helping them rank so highly.

I found :
A large number of the links were from sites that were high ranking but not in niche
There were a lot of links from sites in niche, that no longer exist

Yet this site was still ranking No2 for one of the keyphrases, should that be ?

Plus if all these ways are not working, what ways are left to promote and get your/my site to the top of the tree ?

Interested also.